15 Facts About Your Favorite Adult Swim Shows

Adult Swim, Cartoon Network's primetime programming block, is celebrating a 15-year anniversary. But the original concept for it truly goes back 1993, when the channel's first programmer—Mike Lazzo—was told by his boss, Ted Turner, to use the limited resources he had at his disposal to whip up some original programming.

Lazzo noticed the new Hanna-Barbera library his boss had acquired and, with the then-current Letterman/Leno late night wars in mind, decided to recycle some animation from the 20-episode series Space Ghost and Dino Boy into a new series, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which paved the way for the absurdist sensibilities that have informed Adult Swim's brand of television ever since. To celebrate its 15th anniversary, here are some facts about some of your all-time favorite Adult Swim shows.

1. SPACE GHOST COAST TO COAST'S ANIMATION DIRECTOR LANDED THE ROLE OF ZORAK WITH A SPOT-ON IMPERSONATION.

YouTube

Space Ghost Coast to Coast animation director C. Martin Croker was a fan of the original series, and ended up landing the role of Zorak via an impromptu audition, when he did a spot-on voice impersonation of the character. He would eventually get the voice gig for Moltar, too. Croker also came up with the idea of setting the show in space and suggested that Zorak and Moltar should be performing their bandleader and producing duties as unwilling prisoners.

2. THE BEE GEES WERE SPACE GHOST'S MOST MISBEHAVED GUESTS.

The singers cursed and laughed so much that only about 19 seconds of their interview was useable.

3. DANA SNYDER BECAME MASTER SHAKE THANKS TO TWO DRUNKEN VOICEMAILS.

After a night out enjoying some adult beverages with a friend, Dana Snyder followed Aqua Teen Hunger Force (2000-2015) co-creator Dave Willis’ directions and left his audition on his voicemail. Willis loved what he heard, but accidentally erased it and needed to play it for his boss. When Snyder tried it again sober, it didn’t have the same effect for Willis. So Snyder repeated his drunken night out, recorded it again at 3 a.m. the next morning, and won the part.

One network directive Willis and co-creator Matt Maiellaro remembered and would address in the episode “Gee Whiz” was to “limit the blood to a three-second spray.”

5. THE ORIGINAL SEALAB 2021 PILOT WAS 24 MINUTES LONG AND NOT LIKED BY ANYBODY.

Future Archer creator Adam Reed and co-creator Matt Thompson took the old Sealab 2020 (1972) series footage and turned it into a 24-minute show with new audio. Cartoon Network said no "on the spot," according to Reed. But then, yet again, alcohol came into play. "It was a little while later and Matt and I were absolutely broke and we just got drunk as hell and watched one episode of the old show over and over," Reed told TIME in 2010. "Probably watched it 10 times with the sound turned down to match the lip flap with whatever spewed out. And we re-cut it into this random seven-minute show, and it turned out they were trying to find shorter things for this new Adult Swim concept, and they bought it."

6. THERE'S A LITTLE MIKE BRADY IN HARVEY BIRDMAN.

YouTube

Gary Cole auditioned for Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law (2000-2007) over the phone. "There was an element of Mike Brady in [the voice], in that I thought Harvey was just as vacant in his head as Mike Brady," said Cole (who, coincidentally, played Mike Brady in 1995's The Brady Bunch Movie and its sequel). "I pictured a little more of a superhero/game-show-host voice, and that's how I read for it."

7. THE VENTURE BROS. IS ABOUT FAILURE.

“It’s about that failure happens to all of us," executive producer Doc Hammer theorized about The Venture Bros., which was created by Jackson Publick. "Every character is not only flawed, but sucks at what they do, and is beautiful at it and Jackson and I suck at what we do, and we try to be beautiful at it, and failure is how you get by ... It shows that failure’s funny, and it’s beautiful and it’s life, and it’s OK, and it’s all we can write because we are big failures.”

That was in season one. By the time Hammer and Publick went back to look at season five, the quote had made the rounds. "I don’t think our failure was ever, 'These people are incompetent,'" Hammer added. "I think our failure was they’re so terribly human in a world of comic book inhumanness, and that’s kind of our long joke. These people are stuck in a world that could only exist in an inhuman Saturday morning show, and they’re real. It’s a big mess."

“They sent me an envelope with a DVD, and usually I throw those things away, but this envelope also had an itemized bill in it,” Mr. Show co-creator and Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk toldVariety. “There was a charge for postage, a charge for packaging, for shipping—everything. And it made me laugh." Odenkirk liked what he saw and got the two into a room with Adult Swim executives, leading to Tom Goes to the Mayor and then Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, and other shows they've produced. Wareheim got to quit his job at Urban Outfitters.

9. TWO EPISODES OF THE BOONDOCKS WERE BANNED BY ADULT SWIM.

Both "The Hunger Strike" and "The Uncle Ruckus Reality Show" painted BET in an unfavorable light, and drew the alleged ire of BET executives. They urged Adult Swim not to air them. Cartoon Network agreed after legal action was threatened.

10. ROBOT CHICKEN WAS NAMED AFTER A MENU ITEM.

Robot Chicken is on the menu at the Chinese restaurant Kung-Pao Bistro in West Hollywood, California. Writer/star Breckin Meyer said that neither he nor the creators of the series, Matt Senreich and Seth Green, "know what the hell it is.”

11. CHILDRENS HOSPITAL TOOK THEIR BRAZIL JOKE AS FAR AS ACTUALLY GOING TO BRAZIL.

"In the first season I have a scene with Megan Mullally and she’s feeling a little insecure and I’m saying, ‘Listen, you’re the best damn administrator in this hospital.’ And just as an afterthought, David Wain [the Childrens executive producer who ran the show with Corddry and Jonathan Stern] suggested we add, ‘You’re the best damn administrator in all of Brazil.’ And then we just decided to expound on that: ‘Which is where we are right now. We are in Brazil.’ And that became a running joke … It was one of those things that everybody on the crew laughed at. And then all of a sudden the next day, in the nurses’ station, little pictures of Pele would start popping up. And we’d be like, ‘Okay guys, let us choose where the Brazil jokes are.’"

For season three, they put $15,000 aside in the budget to travel to Rio for four days and shoot one scene for the episode "Nip/Tug." "It was not necessary, we did not need it, it was not pushing the story along whatsoever, and we didn’t care," Corddry said.

12. JON GLASER DEVELOPED HIS DELOCATED CHARACTER ON LATE NIGHT WITH CONAN O'BRIEN.

On Conan, Glaser played a guy who tried to continue his work as an impressionist even though he was now in the Witness Protection Program (all of his voices now sounded the same.) "It was dumb," Glaser admitted, "but it was always fun to do and the thing I liked about it was that he was super arrogant and smug and confident, even though his humor was sh*tty and hacky, and just that archetype of a character, the smug a**hole, was really fun to do and I always wanted to do something with it after I left Conan, so that's where the idea came from for this show."

13. JOHN C. REILLY WON'T TALK ABOUT PLAYING DR. STEVE BRULE.

YouTube

"I just showed up with my costume and started channeling that guy. I don't know where he came from. I find the less I say about Steve Brule the better. I think of him as real, and anytime I start to analyze him, it just gets really boring," Reilly told Esquire about playing the title character in Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule, before saying he wasn't interested in talking about him anymore.

Tim Heidecker revealed that Reilly cannot see through the glasses Brule wears. "So he does kind of zone out, and there’s a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde kind of thing where he really gets into that character. It’s amazing. He does think of that guy as another person."

14. THE RICK AND MORTY PILOT SCRIPT WAS WRITTEN IN SIX HOURS.

The original concept from Justin Roiland was from an animation he made for Community creator Dan Harmon and writer/director Rob Schrab's nonprofit short film festival, Channel 101. He made admittedly bad impressions of Doc and Marty from Back to the Future for a short called The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti. Immediately after Harmon and Roiland successfully pitched the idea to Adult Swim, Roiland suggested to Harmon they just stay in Harmon's office and write the pilot script right then and there instead of doing it over three months.

15. THE ERIC ANDRE SHOW PILOT WAS TAPED IN A "SEMI-ILLEGAL" BODEGA IN BROOKLYN.

YouTube

"It had crap and piles of broken glass everywhere and it was super nasty and we just cleaned it up a little bit, threw up curtains," Eric Andre explained. "While we were shooting, like six to seven different dudes claimed that they owned the place." Andre ran out of money and taught himself Final Cut Pro to edit it. A bunch of networks said no to him, except for Adult Swim.

You see them every day, on TV shows, the news, and in movies, but how well do you know the most oft-used film transitions? Here are the big five:

1. THE DISSOLVE

The dissolve is an editing technique where one clip seems to fade—or dissolve—into the next. As the first clip is fading out, getting lighter and lighter, the second clip starts fading in, becoming more and more prominent. The process usually happens so subtly and so quickly, the viewer isn't even aware of the transition. The above video offers a great overview of the cut, with examples.

2. THE WIPE

This transition is the opposite of the dissolve in that it draws attention to itself. The best example of the wipe is what's known as the Iris Wipe, which you usually find in silent films, like Buster Keaton's or the Merrie Melodies cartoons—the circle getting smaller and smaller. Other wipe shapes include stars, diamonds, and the old turning clock.

The Star Wars films are chock-full of attention-grabbing wipes. Here are two good examples from The Empire Strikes Back. The first shows the clock wipe; the second, the diagonal wipe (pay no attention to the broken blocks at the start of the second clip—that's a technical glitch, not part of the film).

3. THE CUTAWAY

As the name implies, in the basic cutaway, the filmmaker is moving from the action to something else, and then coming back to the action. Cutaways are used to edit out boring shots (like people driving to their destination—why not see what the character is seeing or even thinking sometimes?) or add action to a sequence by changing the pace of the footage. My favorite use of the cutaway is in Family Guy, where the technique is used to insert throwaway gags. Here's a great example:

4. THE L CUT

The L Cut, also called a split edit, is a very cool technique whose name dates back to the old analog film days.

The audio track on a strip of celluloid film runs along the side, near the sprocket holes. In the L Cut transition, the editor traditionally cut the picture frames out of the strip, but left the narrow audio track intact, thus creating an L-shape out of the film. A different camera angle, or scene was then spliced into the spot where the old picture was, so the audio from the old footage was now cut over the new footage.

Of course, with digital editing, one doesn't need to physically cut anything anymore, but the transition is still widely used, and the name has remained the same.

Split edits like these are especially effective in portraying conversations. Imagine how a simple conversation between two people might look if all we ever got was a ping-pong edit back and forth between the two people talking. The L cut allows the viewer to read the emotion on the listener's face, as the dialogue continues over, as we see in this clip from Ferris Bueller's Day Off:

5. THE FADE

The fade in and fade out usually signal the beginning or end of a scene, especially if the filmmaker is fading to/from black. This is the most common, of course, but fading to white has become trendy, too. The opening title sequence from the HBO series Six Feet Under featured many fades to black and a couple brief fades to white. The very last bit in the sequence fades slowly to white, and is my all-time favorite example of the transition:

For close to 90 years, Chic Young’s comic strip Blondie has been a constant in newspapers around the world, reaching an estimated 280 million readers in 55 countries. Despite its title, most readers are probably more familiar with Blondie’s husband, the sandwich-consuming Dagwood. Check out some facts about the comic’s origins, its feature film franchise, and a very unfortunate incident involving a dirty word that rocked Blondie's readership to its core.

1. BLONDIE WAS INSPIRED BY 1920S FLAPPERS.

IDW/King Features Syndicate

Before Blondie debuted in 1930, cartoonist Chic Young had attempted to create a female-driven strip without a lot of success. Titles like Beautiful Bab and Dumb Dora were some of the more unfortunate ideas, with Young preoccupied by the notion of having a vapid leading lady. For Blondie, Young initially pursued the “dumb blonde” stereotype before dialing down the chauvinism and allowing the single, mingling Blondie Boopadoop to appear at least as intelligent as the succession of boyfriends courting her in the strip. Later, Blondie would become the voice of reason [PDF] to fiance Dagwood Bumstead’s bumbling presence, inverting the gender roles of Young’s previous strips.

2. YOUNG SOLD THE STRIP BY SENDING EDITORS A PAPER DOLL OF BLONDIE IN LINGERIE.

For the debut of Blondie, Young’s syndicate, King Features, launched an aggressive mailing campaign in an effort to entice newspaper editors to pick up the strip. Editors first received a letter “announcing” the engagement of Blondie and Dagwood, which was followed by protestations from the Bumstead family and eventually a cardboard suitcase that cautioned them not to peek inside. Naturally, everyone did. Inside was a paper doll cutout of Blondie wearing lingerie, with her “wardrobe” (more paper doll clothing) included.

3. DAGWOOD WAS ORIGINALLY THE HEIR TO A RAILROAD FORTUNE.

He might strike you as incapable of tying his own shoes, but there was a time when Dagwood Bumstead carried real potential. Instead of his current working-stiff incarnation, Dagwood was originally heir to his billionaire father’s railroad fortune. But when he married Blondie in 1933, the Bumstead family effectively disowned him, fearing Blondie was only out for his money. The couple’s move to the middle class was Young’s way of acknowledging the fallout of the Great Depression.

4. DAGWOOD WENT ON A HUNGER STRIKE IN ORDER TO MARRY BLONDIE.

With the Bumstead family highly skeptical of Dagwood’s plans to marry Blondie, the would-be groom decided to earn their blessing by going on a hunger strike that played out in real time. For 28 days, Dagwood refused to eat and grew frail until his family finally consented to the marriage. The narrative stunt drew the attention of new readers, raising Blondie’s profile on the comic pages.

5. DAGWOOD AND BLONDIE SCANDALOUSLY SLEPT IN THE SAME BED.

King Features Syndicate

For a good portion of the 20th century, it was seen as proper to depict married couples on television or in comics as sleeping in twin beds, eliminating any hint of carnal activities happening off-screen. (Or in this case, off-panel.) But Young thought this was juvenile and insisted that Blondie and Dagwood appear sleeping in the same double bed. Perhaps not coincidentally, the two had their first child, Alexander, in 1934.

6. THE EARLY STRIPS HAD AN UNFORTUNATE PREOCCUPATION WITH DOMESTIC VIOLENCE.

While Blondie and Dagwood got along without incident, the same couldn’t be said for another couple featured in the strip’s early years. One of Blondie’s earlier suitors, Hiho, married girlfriend Betty and the two became supporting characters in the strip. Hiho and Betty had what could be considered a tumultuous relationship, with each threatening to punch out the other on a regular basis [PDF]. Young eventually phased the two out, replacing them with far less volatile Bumstead neighbors Herb and Tootsie Woodley.

7. DAGWOOD ENDORSED NUCLEAR POWER.

After the atomic bomb was dropped twice to bring an end to World War II, American citizens understandably grew skittish about the ramifications of wielding such power. To ease their minds, the U.S. military partnered with Young to produce 1949’s Dagwood Splits the Atom, a “fun” booklet that sees the character shrunk down in size to help readers understand atomic power and nuclear fission. Although other comic characters like Popeye appear, it’s Dagwood who has the honors of blowing a neutron into a uranium atom in order to split it.

8. YOUNG’S DEATH PROMPTED NEWSPAPERS TO DROP THE STRIP.

Although Young’s son Dean had been working on Blondie and was prepared to take over writing duties when his father passed away in 1973, newspapers weren’t so sure. According to Young, more than 600 papers canceled the strip when his father died, fearing it would suffer a drop in quality. Young persevered and eventually won over the naysayers, reclaiming space in the papers and adding several hundred more. (Currently, Young writes the strip and artist John Marshall illustrates.)

9. THE STRIP LAUNCHED 28 FEATURE FILMS.

In 1938, with Blondie firmly entrenched on the comics pages, King Features and Young agreed to license the strip to Columbia Pictures for a series of live-action feature films. The movies were shot quickly and economically with stars Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake portraying Blondie and Dagwood, respectively. The studio produced 28 features between 1938 and 1950. Attempts to adapt the comic to television were less successful. A 1954 pilot was unaired, while a 1957 series lasted just one season. Another 13-episode iteration was produced in 1968-69, with Bruce Lee appearing as a karate instructor in the last episode.

10. THE STRIP CAUGHT FLAK FOR USING A DIRTY WORD IN 2004.

With their relatively trivial subject matter, comic strips rarely have the potential to offend. A 2004 Blondie entry proved to be an exception. In the strip, a character uses the word “scumbag” to describe a baseball umpire. Readers wrote in to Dean Young to lodge complaints, with Mr. Young and his proofreaders apparently unaware that “scumbag” is a euphemism for a used prophylactic.

11. ALMOST EVERY COMIC STRIP CHARACTER AROUND DROPPED IN FOR THEIR 75TH ANNIVERSARY.

King Features Syndicate

Before shared universes were a thing, Blondie’s 75th anniversary strip published September 4, 2005 had a cameo from virtually every notable comic strip character past and present. As Dagwood and Blondie hold up a cake—shaped like a sandwich, naturally—they’re surrounded by Ziggy, Garfield, Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, Dilbert, and dozens of others. In the weeks leading up to the strip, the comics pages were full of Blondie references and sight gags.